Wally World He might as well be on another planet given the scant attention he gets, but Miami of Ohio forward Wally Szczerbiak just may be the best player in the nation

Students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, can be a restivelot. Last May they overturned cars and threw bottles and rocksat cops to protest a proposed town ordinance that would havemoved up closing time at local bars by one hour, to 1 a.m. Buton the day before the beginning of this semester, an Augustafternoon stifling enough to incite a full riot, two dozenstudents stand in a checkout line at the campus bookstore,docile as sheep, while advancing at a glacial pace. Mostcontented of all is a 6'8" senior with beetle brows and awinsome, lose-few smile.

Wally (World) Szczerbiak isn't beaming quite as brightly as hedid a few hours earlier while running back downcourt aftertap-dunking the muffed layup of a Miami teammate during a pickupgame. Or grinning quite as broadly as he did at lunch, whenanother RedHawks' player noted the sesame pellets sprinkled overSzczerbiak's lettuce and asked, "What, a rabbit take a dump onyour salad?" Or glowing as brilliantly as he had a little whileearlier while recounting how, at freshman orientation threeyears ago, he had met Shannon Ward, the Ohio farm girl andpart-time model whose company he has kept ever since. Butconsidering that he's lugging a crateful of books with titlessuch as Principles of Operations Management and getting nowhere,Szczerbiak, whom NBA scouting director Marty Blake calls "thebest shooter in America," is in what, for anyone else, wouldpass as megawatt mode. The others in line stay in line. For ifWorld can wait, they can, too.

"You'll be studying so much you won't have a chance to playbasketball!" says the cashier when, nearly an hour later, shefinally rings him up.

To better understand what unalloyed joy has to do with being notonly the nation's top shooter but also SI's choice as the bestall-around collegiate player in the land, it's worth making theschlepp across campus to the office of the man who nicknamedSzczerbiak after the amusement park in National Lampoon'sVacation. Miami coach Charlie Coles knows a little bit aboutsavoring life's every moment. He describes himself as "a guywho's already used up his redshirt year" and then yanks down theneckline of his polo shirt to reveal what looks like the outlineof a pack of Camels just below the skin of his left breast. It'sa defibrillator, installed after Coles went into cardiac arrestduring the first round of last season's Mid-American Conferencetournament.

"Now, I don't want Wally thinking the game's a carnival," Colessays, "but I always tell him that he plays better when he's in agreat mood, when he's got that smile on his face. I've seen someplayers, they get mad, they play better. Not Wally."

Like that cinematic fun park, Wally World promises thrills atevery turn. He posts up and throws down. He jumps center andblocks shots, rebounds and leads the break. He can snap adefender's ankles with a crossover or curl around a screen for asplay-legged three. From that playful first name to hisunspellable last--"Ukrainian name, Polish spelling," says hisdad, Walt, a former player in the ABA and Europe--from thatarcade's worth of skills to an off-season jones for boogieboarding, there's an aspect of whimsy to Szczerbiak, who figuresto follow Ron Harper and Dan Majerle as the next MAC nugget inthe NBA.

Coles fires up the VCR. There's Szczerbiak in the secondovertime of a game against Dayton last season, flicking in threestraight threes and blocking a shot. There's an SEC-quality slamin transition at Tennessee that, like almost all of theRedHawks' action, went untelevised. Coles loads another tape,this one from a game against Ohio. From the right cornerSzczerbiak jabs left and then sails along the baseline,Statue-of-Libertying the ball in his right hand before flushingit down. "He may not be from New York City itself," Coles says,"but he's from New York."

Though Szczerbiak averaged 36.6 points a game as a high schoolsenior, recruiting services underrated him because he came fromnamby-pamby Cold Spring Harbor High on the tony north shore ofLong Island. He arrived in Oxford as an unheralded afterthoughtand then grabbed everyone's attention by hitting all nine of hisshots in his first home game. Since then he has made more thanhalf of his shots from the field, including 47.6% of his threes.

Szczerbiak did himself no bigger favor than to spend last summerplaying for the U.S. Goodwill Games team, which included Duke'sElton Brand, Connecticut's Khalid El-Amin and Utah's AndreMiller. At the trials in Colorado Springs, Szczerbiak sprang for43 points in one scrimmage, sinking nine of 11 three-pointers."There was a junior USA Basketball team of recent high schoolgrads and high school seniors-to-be, all highly touted, trainingout there," says St. Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, who assistedClem Haskins of Minnesota with the Goodwill Games team. "It wasinvaluable for them to watch this guy who they'd never heard ofkick everybody's ass."

When the team got to Madison Square Garden for the Games,Szczerbiak scarcely cooled off. He led the U.S. with a17.2-point scoring average and got six in overtime of the goldmedal game, in which the Americans defeated Australia 93-85.(Few people know that 27 years earlier Walt, then a forward forGeorge Washington, played Julius Erving of Massachusetts to avirtual standoff in the same building. Dr. J had 35 points and17 rebounds to Walt's 32 points and 23 boards in a 70-65 UMasswin.) "In our country we've got plenty of tremendous athleteswith no clue how to play basketball," says Haskins, "but Wallyplays the game the way it should be played: hard and undercontrol. He makes shots, and he makes plays."

Coles puts a finer point on it: "He's got an East Coast kind ofgame. Crafty, and a little bit old school. Sizing people up andthen beating them. I think it comes from his dad."

After Walt played the 1971-72 season with the ABA's PittsburghCondors, the team folded, and he was picked up by the KentuckyColonels in a dispersal draft. He was cut in the preseason,however, and then signed on with the Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) Baronsof the old Eastern League. For shooting better than 60% andleading the Barons to the title, he collected $100 a game--"$83after taxes," Walt says--and got a contract offer from the NBA'sBuffalo Braves. But because the Braves guaranteed only oneseason, Szczerbiak passed. Instead he signed a five-year dealwith Real Madrid, then the Boston Celtics of Europe, with anout-clause if he ever wanted to head back to the States to trythe NBA.

He never did. Szczerbiak helped Madrid win three European clubchampionships in the late 1970s. Teammates called him Too Late,for that's what he'd say to defenders who rushed at him aninstant after he had squeezed off his unusually faithful shot.In one game opponents were so tardy that Szczerbiak knocked down25 of 27 from the field and scored 65 points, still the Spanishsingle-game record. He and his wife, Marilyn, loved theexpatriate life--the food, the friends and the parks where theycould take little Wally, who was born in Madrid in '77. Theflight attendant who lived next door would drop by theSzczerbiaks' apartment to marvel at the 18-month-old who couldhoist a Nerf ball over his head and, once in every three or fourtries, fling it through the hoop rigged over a doorway. Later,after gigs with a team in Udine in the Italian League andanother in Tenerife in Spain's Canary Islands, Walt would regretnothing, except that it's hard to call yourself a professionalbasketball player if you've never spent a minute in the NBA.

His European career over at age 35, Walt couldn't give up thegame. For the past 12 years he has served as the North Americanrep for Spain's Asociacion de Clubs de Baloncesto (ACB), workingout of his Long Island home as a sort of Martinez Blake,bird-dogging those tweeners and sleepers who might be a late NBAcut or go undrafted but could make it in the Spanish league. Inshort, he gets paid to search for someone who can break hisrecord. Even as he pushed into his 40s, he would find a gymwhere former college standouts such as George Bruns, BillySchaeffer and Al Seiden mustered on weekends. Wally first taggedalong to watch his dad and share a postgame burger and soda.Eventually he began to play.

"Twice a week, with my dad and his friends, I learned the tricksyou don't learn in the park--all the intricacies of the game,"Wally says. "Today I hear the scouts saying, 'Not only can heshoot, pass and dribble, he knows how to play the game. He knowshow to run a ball screen and a pick-and-roll.' Well, that's whereI learned it.

"But then I'd play with my friends and in AAU ball. The playerswere young and athletic. That's where I got the jiggles and thefeints. Nowadays you need both the old stuff and the new stuff tobe successful."

Wally has two advantages that Walt didn't. Having been confinedto the post most of his career, the 6'6" Walt made sure, whilecoaching Wally through fifth, sixth and seventh grade, that hisson learned how to face the basket and put the ball on thefloor. Today, with a dribble drive to go with an outside shot,he's a sort of souped-up Majerle--a Majerle Davidson, if you will.

The other difference between the two Szczerbiaks may be whatwill allow the son to someday surpass the father. In Walt's daya shooter rarely went near a barbell for fear of harming histouch. That thinking has changed. Before last season Wallyincreased his bench press from 185 to 300 pounds. He also gainedseven pounds, pared his body fat from 14% to 9% and raised hisvertical leap by 4 1/2 inches to 30 1/2, an increase so dramaticthat RedHawks strength coach Dan Dalrymple took three separatemeasurements for fear he had made a mistake. Szczerbiak suddenlycarried 241 pounds, and his stroke hadn't lost one feather ofgoose down. "The Philadelphia 76ers have trained in our gym for11 of the 13 years that I've been at St. Joe's," says Martelli,"and his body matches up with any of theirs."

All that summer weight work helped Szczerbiak lead the nation inscoring through the first few weeks of last season with a 29.4average. Thus Coles reacted the way any coach might have when, onJan. 3, Wally broke his right wrist and was lost for eight games."The worst thing that could happen happened," Coles said at thetime.

Coles, 56, had no way of knowing how wrong he was. Less than twomonths later, the RedHawks were in Kalamazoo, Mich., a seventhseed in the MAC tournament, facing second-seeded WesternMichigan in the first round. Moments after the RedHawks hadbroken a timeout huddle, with the score tied and just over 11minutes to play in the first half, Coles keeled over and hit thefloor with a thud. Miami, the school known as the Cradle ofCoaches, had nearly sent one to his grave.

Officials suspended the game for two hours while Coles wastreated courtside and at a local hospital. After being assuredthat Coles would survive, Szczerbiak and his co-captain, guardDamon Frierson, gathered their teammates to decide whether tocomplete the game the following day or play on. Coles likes totalk about "the long way around"--how, in coming to Miami andchoosing a league like the MAC, a young man has usually forswornshortcuts and cop-outs. Following a regular season in which theRedHawks lost not only Szczerbiak for three weeks but also fourother players to injuries or academic failures, there wasn'tmuch deliberation. "We knew our coach wanted us to be warriorsand go on and play," Szczerbiak says. Miami won the game andbeat Kent several nights later before losing to Eastern Michiganin the final as Szczerbiak scored 26 points but was trumped bythe Eagles' Earl Boykins, who had 29.

This season Szczerbiak is joining such recent senior stars asTim Duncan and Keith Van Horn as examples of the propositionthat, by staying in school for four years, a college player canhelp his game and himself. In a sense, Wally is living his lifemuch as Walt did. Wally has his Real Madrid in mid-major Miami,an idyllic, out-of-the-way place with more to offer than justbasketball. He has his Marilyn in Shannon, who takes many of thesame courses he does so she can fill him in if a road tripcauses him to miss class. He has his Madison Square Gardenmoment, one that even ended in victory. And he has the strokeand the smarts that served his father so well. "In the GoodwillGames one move he made was a flashback," Marilyn Szczerbiaksays. "I could see Walt exactly."

The night before he's to drive from Long Island back to campusfor his senior year, Wally sits at the dining room table,listening to Walt recount the vicissitudes of his pro career.The contours of these stories are familiar to Wally, but many ofthe details are new, including the stats Walt recites from hisfinal scrimmage with the Colonels to support his claim that hewas unjustly released. He even offers to produce the box score."So you're bitter about that?" Wally asks. "About not playing inthe NBA?"

Walt doesn't really answer. "I don't regret going to Spain," hesays. "If I hadn't, I don't know if I'd still be working inbasketball. But as a competitor I'd have loved to have gone upagainst a guy like Wilt Chamberlain. I think I could havecompeted at that level, and I never had a chance to prove it."

Wally will most likely have that chance, but it would bemisleading to say that Walt is spoiling for vicariousvindication. Vindication is a juvenile emotion. Paternal pride,on the other hand, is something it takes a man of a certain ageto know, and Walt fairly swells with it. "Played over at C.W.Post last Sunday," he says. "My team went 0-5. Another guy inthis room, his team went 5-0."

At that, Wally Szczerbiak springs his best move, and that brightsmile warms the room.

COLOR PHOTO: NICK CARDILLICCHIO [Wally Szczerbiak dunking globe in basket--T of C]COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY NICK CARDILLICCHIO [Wally Szczerbiak shooting globe as basketball beside ball rack full of globes]COLOR PHOTO: LOU CAPOZZOLA SHOW OF HANDS Szczerbiak won acclaim in the Goodwill Games as the leading scorer on a U.S. team of college stars that won the gold. [Wally Szczerbiak with basketball against two defenders]B/W PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE SZCZERBIAK FAMILY REIGN IN SPAIN Walt never got his shot at proving himself in the NBA, but he still holds scoring records in Spain. [Walt Szczerbiak shooting basketball in game]

Few people know it, but Wally's father once played Julius Ervingto a virtual standoff in Madison Square Garden.

"Some guys today have no clue how to play basketball," saysHaskins. "Wally plays it the way it should be played."